Notre Dame: Max Redfield slows things down to play fast

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SOUTH BEND, Ind. — In a sense, Max Redfield has both slowed things down and sped things up heading into a crucial junior season.

The California native and former blue-chip recruit has had a bumpy ascent to get to this point, with last year’s communication errors and benching after a loss to Arizona State accounting for much of the turbulence. But entering his second season as a starting safety in defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder’s scheme, Redfield said the defense has slowed down for him, which in turn will allow him to react better and play faster this fall.

“(It’s) exponentially slower,” Redfield said. “When I was younger I was just trying to survive, and now I’m trying to thrive and be perfect.”

Redfield said his knowledge of situational football — down and distance, etc. — allows him to better anticipate what VanGorder will call in a certain spot. There’s less thinking involved since a lot of it has become muscle memory, so Redfield’s five-star athleticism can finally start to take over.

“Overthinking football on a play-by-play basis is something that you don’t want,” Redfield said. “You want to act fluidly in the game without thinking because you have so much muscle memory within the system that you’re comfortable with your job, you don’t have to think about doing your job every time.”

[RELATED: Better depth leads to more flexibility for Notre Dame secondary]

Notre Dame can’t afford to have its safeties — be it Redfield or Matthias Farley, or Elijah Shumate, Avery Sebastian and Drue Tranquill — fall into the same pattern of communication errors they did in 2014. Mistakes are still being made, though: coach Brian Kelly said last week his defense would’ve been better off having two traffic cones playing safety during practice than Redfield and Shumate.

Some good news for Notre Dame is there’s much better depth behind Redfield and Shumate than there was last year. Farley is an experienced starter and team captain, while Sebastian is a fifth-year graduate transfer from Cal and Tranquill played plenty of snaps as a true freshman in 2014.

But Notre Dame’s defense’s best chance at being successful this fall involves strong years from Redfield and Shumate. Despite that traffic cone quip, Kelly said he’s overall been happy with Redfield’s preseason with Saturday’s opener against Texas looming.

“He's a different player than last year, a much more mature player,” Kelly said. “He's much more mature in everything that he does on a day-to-day basis. That just has carried on to what he does on the football field. Feel really good about Max Redfield as one of our safeties, no question.”

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